Justice reform to cost $2M more

Proposal adds 25.5 employees, will cover 500 more probationers

Jan. 16, 2013

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A criminal justice reform package designed to save money in the long-term through alternatives to incarceration will cost more to implement than Gov. Dennis Daugaard asked for during his December budget address.

At the first legislative hearing for the Public Safety Improvement Act on Tuesday, state officials told members of the Joint Appropriations committee that the proposal would require $8 million — up from about $6 million — in up-front and ongoing funds and add 25.5 full-time employees in four agencies.

The measure is designed to control corrections costs by shifting from a focus on lockups to treatment, probation and monitoring.

Daugaard told legislators during a budget address in December and his State of the State address this month that two new prisons would be needed within 10 years at a cost of $200 million dollars if the inmate population continues to grow.

Senate Bill 70 ultimately is built to help the state avoid those costs, but putting those alternatives in place will take time and money.

“This is not a free initiative,” State Budget Director Jason Dilges told the committee on Tuesday. “It is more costly than the status quo at the outset.”

Jim Seward, Daugaard’s general counsel, said the cost estimates as calculated now put the savings at a conservative $162 million. Most of the savings come by avoiding new prisons.

“To add 25 full-time employees seems like a lot, but if you imagine building a new women’s prison, you’d need a lot more than 25 people,” Seward said.

The women’s prison in Pierre has the equivalent of 70 full-time employees, Department of Corrections spokesman Michael Winder said.

Daugaard’s December speech put the startup cost at just more than $6 million and called for the hiring of 6.5 full-time employees for drug and alcohol courts. The revised figure presented on Monday was $8 million in startup and ongoing costs in the next three to five years.

Dilges said Monday that the initial estimate was prepared before the criminal justice work group completed the report that would form the basis of the bill. The budget was prepared in mid-November.

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“We had to go with the numbers we had at the time,” Dilges said.

The costs largely are associated with an expansion of drug and alcohol courts, data collection and county reimbursement for the expected addition of approximately 500 people to the state’s probation rolls.

The bill would create a presumption of probation for low-level felons, which would mean that the majority of nonviolent felons would be sentenced to supervision with suspended prison time.

The Unified Judicial System’s Court Services Director, Pat Duggan, said her office estimates that the bill will result in about 500 additional probationers in the next three years.

Under the law, those probationers would earn time off their supervision term by following the rules set out by their judge and probation officer, but “we’ve got to be prepared to handle those people up front,” Duggan said.

The UJS would be required to set up a collections agency for unpaid fines, re-train its current probation officers in evidence-based practices, develop a graduated sanction grid to punish probationers who violate judges’ orders and gather additional data on violations and early discharges from probation.

The UJS will report its findings to an oversight committee, which is tasked with monitoring the effectiveness of the various provisions of the bill.

“We’re going to have to collect more data than we could imagine and report on it at least twice a year,” Duggan said.

The UJS would need nine new full-time employees to handle probationers, as well as assist with training and data collection, Duggan said. Another 6.5 probation officers would be hired to specialize in drug and alcohol court monitoring.

The largest chunk of ongoing funding in the bill goes to behavioral health services, however.

The state Department of Social Services would use the funding to provide mental health and substance abuse assessments for the additional 500 probationers. The cost would be $2.6 million.

The work group interviewed judges, prosecutors and others around the state last year as part of its research, Dilges said, and many of them explained that nonviolent offenders were sent to prison to get treatment.

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Sometimes, he said, the judges were surprised to learn during the discussions that the treatment the offender needed wasn’t even available in prison.

“Sending a person to prison to get treatment is not the most responsible way of doing things,” Dilges said.

Kim Malsam-Rysdon, secretary of DSS, said her department would need four additional employees to help provide treatment services to offenders outside the prison walls.

The DSS money would help the agency reach out to treatment providers across the state for accreditation, Malsam-Rysdon said. Currently, there are 57 accredited providers and 11 accredited behavioral health centers in the state.

“We would expect that additional providers will request to become accredited,” Malsam-Rysdon said.

The DSS also would use the money to expand cognitive behavioral therapy services, meant to help those who have mental health issues beyond addiction that contribute to criminal behavior.

“We really have limited services in this area now,” she said.

The bill adds four DOC employees and allocates funding for a pilot project that would place certain inmates leaving prison into outside housing. Currently, some departing inmates without a home are released into minimum security facilities, where they live alongside inmates still serving sentences.

The bill also calls on the DOC to work with the Office of Tribal Relations to create an outreach program for parole supervision on the state’s Indian reservations. DOC Secretary Denny Kaemingk, a nine-year member of the board of pardons and parole before taking on his current role, said Native Americans on parole often want to go home after a prison stay but fail to get parole board approval because of a lack of supervision on the reservations.

“This is a need that we’ve had for quite a while,” Kaemingk said.

The Attorney General’s Office would add two employees to operate a statewide victim notification system, which would allow crime victims to call an automated hotline for information about the offenders who victimized them.

Attorney General Marty Jackley, who said he was “probably the last holdout” to endorse the bill, says he’s pleased with the way the bill has come together.

Jackley voiced his support on Tuesday for the drug court provisions, the victim notification system and the long-term savings associated with the changes.

“It’s something that will save taxpayers money and improve public safety in the long haul,” Jackley said.

Sen. Jim Bradford, a Pine Ridge Democrat and member of the work group, says focusing on substance abuse, behavioral therapy and drug or alcohol courts ultimately will make the public safer.

“I think this is one of the biggest steps forward we’ve made in South Dakota in a long, long time,” Bradford said. “We often talk about investments in our children … I honestly believe this investment in adults will come back to us many fold.”